Nvidia's Tesla K20 debuts at SC12

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.,--Nvidia Corp. has unleashed its Tesla K20 family of GPU accelerators, said to be the firm’s highest performance, most efficient accelerators to date. The massively parallel accelerators are based on Nvidia’s CUDA computing platform and programming model.

Launching the new GPUs at the SC12 supercomputing conference in Salt Lake City on Monday (Nov. 12), Nvidia said its flagship Tesla GPU, the K20X, was providing 90 percent of the performance for the Titan supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. That supercomputer has been named the world’s fastest on the latest Top500 list.

Titan boasts 18,688 K20X GPU accelerators along with the same number of 16-core AMD Opteron 6274 processors for a whopping 17.59 petaflops--or 17.59 quadrillion calculations per second.

The Cray XK7 system is made up of no less than 200 cabinets and sports 710 terabytes of memory.

Nvidia’s Sumit Gupta, general manager for the Tesla product group, said the use of computers for solving scientific problems hasincreased exponentially--as have energy costs--making the use of accelerators all the more necessary for high-performance computing.

Today, more than 200 software applications take advantage of GPU-acceleration, representing a 60 percent increase in less than a year.

“When Fermi came along, it was in the right place at the right time,Gupta said, predicting that this generation Kepler would see even more adoption in the market.

The new Tesla K20 family features two GPUs, the Tesla K20X and K20. The K20X is said to provide 3.95 teraflops single-precision and 1.31 teraflops double-precision peak floating point performance, while the K20 provides 3.52 teraflops of single-precision and 1.17 teraflops of double-precision peak performance.

Nvidia claims the performance boost is a tenfold application acceleration when paired with leading CPUs.

When paired with Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs, for example, Nvidia said the K20X can accelerate many applications up to 10x or more. That’s good news for engineers and scientists alike, with popular programs like Matlab able to run 18.1 times faster, Chroma (for physics) able to run 17.9 times faster, Specfem3D (for earth sciences) able to run 10.5 times faster, and Amber for molecular dynamics running 8.2 times faster.